on san francisco

I first moved to San Francisco in 2021. The city had emptied out due to the pandemic, and rent was unbelievably cheap. I hauled my belongings up three flights of stairs to a walk-up in Lower Haight. I had four roommates. Two worked in tech. Six months in, we discovered they'd been padding the rent total, pocketing the difference to lower their own share. It was a great start.

I've moved in and out of the Bay Area for most of my life. When strangers ask about my hometown, I've got it down to a fifteen second answer: military brat, born in Turkey, bounced up and down California. The longer version is that my grandfather was in the Air Force, stationed in Turkey where my mom met my dad, created me, and moved to Sacramento. That’s where my mom met my stepfather, a horribly behaved Marine who moves us to Pleasanton, then San Diego, then San Ramon.

All of that to say, I consider the Bay Area my hometown. I flew kites at César Chávez Park in Berkeley, slurped soup out of a bread bowl just under the Golden Gate Bridge, and snuck off to Oakland for open mics where my friends free-styled onstage. For many Bay Area kids, there are few reasons to leave, and so we almost always stay put.

I’ve watched San Francisco shift through several forms, but the strangest ones I’ve only read about in books. Jazz clubs in the '40s, hippie love in the '60s, LGBTQ liberation in the '70s, punk shows and artist squats through the '80s and '90s. The whole 20th century, the city was rife with fights for civil rights. You can't walk three blocks without passing some landmark or plaque commemorating a riot, a movement, a place where people actually fought for something that mattered.

It was the dot-com boom in the late ‘90s, a bubble pop that cleared out some of the more ubiquitous grifters, and then a second wave that brought San Francisco the stiff culture we observe today: corporate shuttle buses, branded backpacks, and obscene rent prices. That second wave, in my view, killed whatever humanity the century before it had built.

Fast forward a decade, the lifestyle of this city is a simulacrum of everything that came before it. Hippie love became polyamory with a date-me doc. Artist communes became group houses full of Stanford dropouts building the next AI-powered something-or-other. It bears no relation to any actual reality whatsoever.

This latest version of San Francisco, invented largely by the AI boom, is truly fascinating to me. I like to look at it closely, picking at it like a scab until it oozes blood and pus. I am utterly obsessed with it. I often tell my friends who work in the AI industry that getting a well-paying tech job and just vibing out is a concept I have to fight off—I say, it must feel like heroin in a hot tub. So warm, so soothing and dream-like. It is not something that resonates with my soul, but my animalistic instinct for comfort desires it greatly.

Still, I’m no saint here. I enjoy, in low doses, curling up on the rug of some Victorian home to discuss the imminent threat of advanced artificial intelligence. I reluctantly hold hands with the people next to me, as instructed by a conference organizer, to ground myself in the astroturf before we attend sessions about democracy and AGI. I take Waymos through ravaged neighborhoods and avoid looking too closely at the people bent over at the waist in a drug-induced psychosis.

There are, whether people want to admit it or not, factions in San Francisco. There are believers and non-believers. The former dunks on the latter, vice versa, and that discourse will take up your whole Twitter feed for 48 hours while people vie for internet points. The latest version of this is what brought me to write this piece, as I was nursing my headache in the Nashville airport. 

I munched on chicken and waffles while scrolling incessantly through the latest bullshit: The Pope had tweeted that technologists carry an "ethical and spiritual weight" in their creations and was calling for the builders of AI "to cultivate moral discernment." A famed venture capitalist quote-tweeted it with a meme that essentially meant the Pope, his Holiness, was a fucking idiot.

I can't claim to be a devout believer in God. I rarely went to church growing up. I did, however, recite the Lord's Prayer with my grandparents every night before bed and often repeat it under my breath before my flight takes off. I've also been reading Infinite Jest lately, and this quote from the book's protagonist feels apt here:

"God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I"

At its worst, organized religion instills terror and hatred in its disciples. At its best, it provides a sane moral agenda along with a deep hope in humanity. As corny as it feels to say, I think technology works in a similar same way. Though I find it deeply grotesque to erect golden calfs of capitalists. Yet, that is what we do here.

The posts from that venture capitalist—you might be wondering why I won't say his name, for which the answer is I don't care enough—are now deleted. There was an outpouring of deserved backlash. Though, to his credit, he embodied what defines San Francisco's current era: efficient, memetic shock and an unearned deference to capitalists.

This materializes in a number of ways: billboards for apps dedicated to helping users cheat, promotional videos for a "brainrot code editor" featuring its founder barely lighting a Newport, parties meant to create content rather than connect as people. Technology is the only religion that matters and businessmen are the only messiahs to praise. It’s a new, new San Francisco.

There is no charisma earned through nuance in this debate. You're either a believer or you aren't. I found this post about the "low-status" mark someone in Silicon Valley receives for being a concerned observer of dangerous technologies to be a fitting description. One anonymous account argued with the poster that there is plenty of clout earned by non-believers. That's true, but it’s hard to ignore that unchecked techno-optimism has earned a lot of fucking power in the White House, and skeptics are routinely flayed.

It's unsexy to look at this culture too closely. While Pope Leo's post about ethics in technology earned support in San Francisco's Twitter-sphere, I doubt it will translate into the culture. I've seen enough leaders here backtrack on their morals for capital. Executives who rely on immigrant labor attend fanciful White House dinners while armed agents abduct American citizens. Male tech CEOs who enjoy their right to marry another man yet still provide golden platters to the same president who's been flippant at best on the idea. With messiahs like these, there is little room for holding onto one’s morals in new, new San Francisco.

It’s a shame, really. “Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation,” says Pope Leo. He’s right. Yet the “genuine reverence for life” he calls for is entirely missing. It’s rarely found in the corners of shoeless parties or orgies disguised as philosophy seminars. (Well, actually, there may be hints of it in the latter but most certainly not the former.) It evades the latest batch of 19-year-old YC founders who are dedicated to building "the Entertainment.”

There's a perceptible disillusionment I feel witnessing this gutting of life from the city and the technology it creates. Not all is lost—cynical as this reads, people are fighting back. Even the podcasters are fighting back. I suppose I'm waiting for the next round of bullshit that's just vague enough that pushing against it marks you as a non-believer, and thus, you feel you should just shut the fuck up.